This is, as you would expect from a combination of George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens, a robust and provocative read. Hitchens clearly identifies with his subject, and at times appears to be writing about himself as much as about Orwell. Like Orwell's own best prose, it is a strongly argued, chatty and witty book, combining acute close readings (the comparison between Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Lucky Jim is particularly good) with personal anecdote, a generous aside here and a knee in the groin there.

Unfortunately, this kind of swashbuckling, pugnacious style tends - as so often with Orwell - to slippery generalisations and dreadful overwriting ("he had dirt under his fingernails and an understanding of the rhythms of nature"; "when Spain was menaced by fascism he was among the first to shoulder a rifle and feel the weight of a pack"). This is a book about a "flinty and solitary loner", "as English as roast beef and warm beer", defending "sturdy English virtues". The pages of Orwell's Victory are thick with such terms of heavy-handed praise.

Orwell is variously acclaimed by Hitchens as "one of the founders of the discipline of postcolonialism", a "libertarian before the word had gained currency" and a pioneer of cultural studies. He was "one of the founding fathers of anti-communism" (credited here with inventing the term "cold war"), who "anticipated" the collapse of the Soviet Union and whose Wigan notebooks "would not have disgraced Friedrich Engels". Elsewhere he is a writer whose work "anticipated" and "prefigured" postwar British "angry" fiction, who "helped keep alive the socialist press in England" and who made "the only English contribution to the literature of 20th-century totalitarianism". Like Nostradamus, Orwell was never wrong.

Perhaps all this is true. Perhaps Orwell is "the outstanding English example of the dissident intellectual who preferred above all other allegiances the loyalty to truth". But it hardly needs saying again. Who is going to disagree? You can't argue with a monument. Anyway, who would dare to argue with Christopher Hitchens? Like Orwell, Hitchens repeats the banal claims of orthodoxy disguised as the lonely voice of dissent. Or perhaps it all needs saying again for US readers, for whose benefit, presumably, Hitchens devotes a chapter on "Orwell and America". Considering that Orwell never visited the US and rarely wrote about it except in largely horrified terms, Hitchens has to work hard on his connections to ex-Trotskyite US cold warriors such as Dwight Macdonald and Philip Rahv. In fact, the book's only real criticism of Orwell is that - unlike Hitchens -"he exhibited a curious blind-spot" regarding the US. Or perhaps, as Hitchens says, "it was enough to visit the country in his mind".

But was Orwell always right? His anti-semitic, homophobic and anti-Catholic prejudices aside, no one who changed their opinions so often and so forcefully can have been right all the time. Was Orwell really right to propose armed resistance to Churchill at the beginning of the second world war? Or to argue that fascism and "so-called democracy" are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Or that the Spanish republic was a fascist government?

Like Orwell, Hitchens is impatient with anyone who disagrees with him. Feminist critics of Orwell such as Bea Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe and Janet Montefiore are dismissed with a stern reminder that no one who enjoyed the company of tough-minded women (and who married two of them) can really have been much of a misogynist. Conservatives who have tried to claim Orwell are denounced as clumsy political body-snatchers. Trotskyism is the only political tradition that Hitchens feels is entitled to claim Orwell, whose work is "the most English form in which cosmopolitan and subversive Trotskyism has ever been cast".

By far the longest chapter is devoted to the Orwell-hatred of those on the left, who have never forgiven him for "giving ammunition to the enemy". Edward Thompson, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Isaac Deutscher, Conor Cruise O'Brien and the "sub-literate" Raymond Williams are all given a paragraph or two, just enough to demonstrate their "sheer ill will and bad faith and intellectual confusion", before we are taken to North Korea and Zimbabwe to be reminded why Orwell was right and why everyone else on the left is "too stupid or too compromised" to understand him.

As for the notebooks containing the names of 86 suspected communists, which Orwell passed to the cold warriors in the shadowy Information Research Department, Hitchens regrets that "too much has been made of this trivial episode". Nevertheless, he defends Orwell's actions on the grounds that the IRD was not involved in domestic surveillance, that Orwell was not motivated by personal gain, that nobody suffered as a result, and that, anyway, some of his suspicions turned out to be right. This may seem superficially convincing, but it surely evades the moral issues. And "loyalty to the truth" has its price, though of course it was not paid by Orwell. Unlike many of his enemies, Orwell never lost a job or was blacklisted because of his opinions; he was in constant demand as a reviewer and essayist and all his books were published.

In 1946, the magazine Polemic published a reply to Orwell's "The Prevention of Literature" by the communist poet Randall Swingler, just back from Italy where he had served with the Eighth Army. Swingler did not disagree with Orwell's underlying argument that a writer must "dare to be a Daniel" against the enemies of intellectual liberty. Nor did he take issue with the substance of Orwell's case against the totalitarian cultural policies of the Soviet Union. His objection was rather that Orwell's essay - like so much of his journalism - was pitched at such a level of "intellectual swashbucklery", persuasive generalisation and unsupported assertion, that it was impossible to reply to it. There was, anyway, something absurd about the author of Animal Farm casting himself in the role of Daniel: "What in heaven is Orwell really worried about? He appears at the moment to be getting more space than any other journalist to report truthfully... Orwell's posture of lonely rebel hounded by monstrous pro-Soviet monopolists has a somewhat crocodile appearance..."

In case Swingler had any doubts about the incipient limits to the right of free expression permitted to communists in Britain, his piece was published with sarcastic marginal annotations by Orwell, who took it as a "violent" personal attack, characteristically accusing Swingler of trying to silence him. Swingler - and his brother, the Labour MP Stephen Swingler - later turned up on Orwell's little list. Shortly afterwards Swingler was blacklisted by the BBC, his extra-mural classes investigated and closed down. There were few crimes more serious in cold war Britain than the crime of lèse-Orwell. Such was Orwell's victory.